Reevely: Cultural change needed to stop sexual predation starts at the top

Premier Kathleen Wynne doesn’t know for sure how to make Ontario’s justice system handle sexual-assault cases better, but she’s told two Ottawa ministers to get moving.

Community Safety Minister Yasir Naqvi, the MPP for Ottawa Centre, is to research ways that police forces around the world handle assault complaints better than we do here, so that assault victims feel protected and their claims taken seriously. Attorney General Madeleine Meilleur, the MPP for Ottawa-Vanier, is to find a way to keep trials on sexual-assault charges from becoming invasive investigations of complainants.

“Attacks on women’s sexual history or clothing are too often considered fair game,” Wynne said in a news conference in Toronto at Women’s College Hospital’s sexual assault centre.

“We will explore alternatives to the criminal-justice system that will allow more people to bring complaints forward because we know we can do better,” Wynne said.

She’s not a lawyer, she said, so she doesn’t know precisely what to do. But Meilleur is to consult law schools and lawyers’ groups to talk about how to limit the fierce cross-examination of alleged assault victims that makes many reluctant to report assaults in the first place.

“What is it about this culture we have created — because are all in this together — what is it about this culture we have created that has not created safety for people coming forward?” Wynne asked.

Naqvi and Meilleur are to come up with some answers by next March 8, which is International Women’s Day.

Other ministers have orders, too, in pursuit of what Wynne said she hopes will be a massive cultural shift in Ontario that will make sexual harassment unacceptable and assaults both rarer and easier to punish.

Labour Minister Kevin Flynn is to toughen workplace harassment rules and see what the government can do to help businesses improve their own policies.

Colleges and Universities Minister Reza Moridi is to do the same in higher education, looking for ways to reduce victimization on campuses.

Education Minister Liz Sandals is to take up the cause in schools, including pushing through a new health curriculum that takes up issues of bullying, respect and sexual consent. An earlier version of the material was scrapped by then-premier Dalton McGuinty in 2010 because some parents objected to its talking about masturbation and oral and anal sex. Ontario has been using the same health curriculum since 1998 and it doesn’t deal with some social challenges modern kids face at all.

Liberal MPPs and senior staff will also be put through harassment training, Wynne said, that takes into account “the unique dynamics in the political workplace.” She hopes opposition MPPs will take it, too.

It’s all a response to a torrent of complaints about predatory sexual behaviour, beginning with allegations against CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi but now including federal MPs and entertainer Bill Cosby. Other women have talked about having been raped and not reporting it because they either had absorbed cultural notions that they were partly responsible or they didn’t trust the justice system. New Democrat MPP Cheri DiNovo wrote in Maclean’s just this week about having been assaulted twice in her 20s.

There’s an enormous amount of work to do and Wynne hasn’t given her ministers much time to do it. Which is as it should be. The Ghomeshi case has blown the lid off a cauldron of revolting behaviour, mainly perpetrated by men upon women because the men think they can get away with it, and it’s happening now, around us.

Reforming the criminal justice system, whose very structure all but requires defence lawyers to attack complainants as harshly as they can, certainly won’t be done by March. Changing the way some old-fashioned police officers judge what underlies certain hard-to-prove complaints will be even tougher.

But often, all that’s needed to stop the milder sort of unacceptable behaviour that lays the groundwork for more serious offences — whether it’s making fun on the schoolyard or dirty jokes at work — is for someone, anyone, to speak up and say, “That’s not funny. That’s not OK.”

The willingness to speak out needs to spread throughout the public institutions, from grade schools to the courts, we depend on to teach and enforce justice. If the chorus begins with the cabinet ministers in charge, it’s a good start.

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